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In the fast fashion race, Shein, a Chinese retailer, has rapidly risen to compete with the likes of H&M and Zara — and even Amazon. But a deep look inside the company reveals questionable working and sourcing practices.
SHEIN opening its first pop up store in Paris in 2019
GUANGZHOU — The wall clock says 1:30 p.m. when the neon lights switch on again above the sewing machines and ironing boards. Between the boxes and the mountain-high piles of clothes, workers emerge from their nap. Small camp beds are hastily put away, phones slide back to the bottom of pockets. It's time to get back to work for the approximately 250 employees of this workshop in Nancun, a village that's been absorbed into the megacity of Guangzhou, in the very south of China.
The staccato sounds of the needles pricking the fabrics fills the space again, under the close watch of the foreman. Floral dresses, hoodies and colorful strapless tops are piled up on large tables, soon to be packed in transparent pouches. On the bags, on the labels of the clothes, on the wall at the entrance to the workshop, a single name appears: Shein (pronounced “she-in”).
That name doesn't ring a bell? Ask a teenage girl. She’ll probably show you her jacket, her trousers or an accessory bought for a ridiculous price on the app of her smartphone. Barely known a year ago, Shein has conquered the wardrobes of young fashionistas across Europe and the United States at lightning speed. It's been enough to make "fast fashion" giants like Zara and H&M shake.
Last May, Shein overtook Amazon to become the most downloaded shopping app in the United States. The brand is even leading the American fast fashion sector with over a quarter of the market, as much as H&M and Zara combined.
Shein is now one of the few Chinese consumer brands to make a name for itself in the West. Yet oddly, no one in China is aware. Why? Because the brand does not exist in its native country. Shein exclusively focuses the sales on foreign markets.
By offering an online-only shopping experience, the brand has largely benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic while Zara and H&M stores remained closed. Its sales reportedly exploded by 250% in 2020, exceeding 10 billion dollars or half of the turnover of Spanish clothing giant Inditex, the parent company of Zara. Its social media accounts gather tens of million followers, and shein.com had 126 million visits back in January 2022, a third more than Zara, according to Similarweb.
Rumor now has it that the company, which counts some 10,000 employees and a presence in more than 150 countries, is preparing for a record IPO on Wall Street.
Though Shein is experiencing global success, not much public information about the company and its enigmatic founder, Xu Yangtian, can be found. Specialized in online marketing and SEO, he launched his wedding dress business in 2008, before extending to all types of women's clothing in 2012. The company had neither a factory nor stock and had the articles manufactured according to the orders received.
The turning point happened in 2015 when Xu Yangtian decided to turn his company into a "fast fashion" brand: he hired designers, seized Chinese competitors, set up his own supply chain, shortened his company name to Shein and established its headquarters in Guangzhou, the epicenter of a China which remains the world's largest supplier of clothing despite the increase in the labor cost.
Workers at a clothes manufacturing factory in Lianyungang, China
The concept of "fast fashion" is nothing new, but Shein found a way to reproduce it even faster and much cheaper than the competition. The Shein website is full of $4 dresses, $10 shoes and accessories costing less than a dollar. And when Zara was making the headlines by releasing 10,000 new products a year, with a production cycle of less than four weeks, Shein posted up to 6,000 new items a day and reduced the time from design to packaging to 1-2 weeks.
Shein’s successful strategy mainly relies exclusively on online sales, revenue from Chinese e-commerce (the strong use of influencers and "social-commerce", permanent rewards and special offers to encourage more purchases, etc.), a few tax advantages but also the massive use of algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Shein responds in real time to new trends by using customer data, analyzing searches on the web and social networks and scrutinizing competitors' sites. "The data collected is fed to Shein's in-house design and prototyping team, which develops items based on demand trends and forecasts," says research and advisory firm Coresight Research. Shein starts by producing small quantities. If the design sells quickly, the company orders it again in larger quantities. If it doesn’t, remaining items get discarded and the design is abandoned for good.
But this would not be possible without an extremely well-run production chain. Over time, Shein has forged a close relationship with thousands of Guangzhou suppliers, providing them with on-time payments — which is rare in the industry. In return, the workshops are required to use the management software developed by Shein. “This tool allows Shein and its designers to quickly communicate sales data as well as new styles and market trends to manufacturers. Meanwhile, data on manufacturing processes are quickly sent back to Shein,” says Lili Cui, associate professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
There is not a minute to spare on the fourth floor of the sewing workshops building Les Echos is visiting. “Here, 20,000 items are produced per day. We handle everything, from the purchase of fabrics to the packaging of the items, including cutting. Shein wants us to go fast and gives us fines if we don't meet deadlines,” a foreman says. The conversation ends there. Shein prohibits any visits and comments from its official suppliers, explains the director.
Shein stays very evasive about its supply chain. The retailer relies heavily on small workshops, unlike other international brands who order large volumes from large factories. Shein tells Les Échos it works with 6,000 suppliers but does not publish their names and contact details. That is enough to fuel questions about its production methods.
The lunch break is an opportunity to talk to several workers in the canteen or the eateries adjoining the workshop buildings. Rice and boiled vegetables are quickly swallowed. Everyone rinses their bowl and chopsticks before putting them on the shelf until the next day. Some go to rest in the dormitories or others linger in the workshops.
Pedestrians walk past a Spanish fast fashion retailer Zara store in Shanghai
They all tell us about their extended working hours: “I work from 8 a.m. until noon, then from 1:30 p.m. until 5:30 p.m. and, after dinner, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.,” a seamstress says. The evening is free once a week, either on Saturday or on Sunday. That's a total of 74 hours of work per week.
Under Chinese Labor Law, weekly working hours are limited to a maximum of 44 hours, with 36 additional hours allowed per month. In reality, the textile industry often goes beyond that. What about holidays at Shein? One Sunday per month. "If I need more, I can ask my boss but it means I won't earn anything," explains a worker, specifying that she has no contract or social benefits.
All the workers here are migrants coming from other Chinese provinces who came to find a job or a better salary. “I earn a little more than in Jiangxi [an adjoining province, north of Guangzhou],” says this 50-year-old worker. Like all the employees Les Échos met, she is paid by the piece, which encourages her to increase her hours to produce more. “The more complex the piece is, the higher the pay,” she explains. “To keep it as fair as possible, tasks get distributed by our team leader to amount roughly the same value per worker,” says another seamstress.
A young seamstress talks about 1 yuan per item (15 cents), a woman in charge of packaging mentions 0.3 yuan (5 cents). It is hard to have an idea of the monthly wage. “I earn about 5,000 yuan a month [750 dollars] because I'm not very efficient,” says Hongxia, 19. Others say it is rather around 7,000 to 8,000 yuan per month (1,100 to 1,250 dollars). It all depends on how many tasks were performed, their complexity and the backlog of the workshop.
Most of the workshops are located near Shein's large warehouse in Foshan, a suburb of Guangzhou, from where orders are shipped. "Shein regularly conducts strict and comprehensive audits of its suppliers, and we also partner with third-party auditing companies to closely monitor and audit our suppliers," the company tells Les Échos.
On its U.S. website, the retailer briefly addressed modern slavery in a short statement and published a code of conduct reminding suppliers of their obligation to comply with all applicable laws, including child labor laws. But it is not uncommon in the textile industry for suppliers to subcontract part of the orders to small workshops with no direct link to the retailer, which makes controls difficult.
It takes a simple visit to the residential area of Nancun, where many small workshops are located, to confirm this. Across an alley, our gaze meets hundreds of bags stamped with the Shein logo. The manager, busy ironing long black dresses, says the order comes from “a friend”.
The presence of a very young girl among the three workers soon catches the eye. “I sort out the clothes according to their size then I put labels on them,” she explains. “I arrive around 9 a.m. and leave around 10 p.m. depending on overtime.” She says she earns 0.30 yuan per piece (5 cents) and has worked here since she left middle school last summer. How old is she? “My daughter is 16 and just comes to give me a hand,” her mother, who packs blouses on the side, quickly intervenes to end the discussion. Work is allowed for minors aged 16 and over in China, but night work and overtime is prohibited for those who are still students.
Shein tells Les Échos they conducted 700 audits in 2021, a figure relatively low given the number of suppliers. "It is impossible for Shein to control all the workshops and its code of conduct mainly aims at responding to the concerns of foreign media and consumers," explains Huang Yan, professor at the University of Technology of South China, in Guangzhou. More generally, the requirements in terms of production speed and the use of small workshops do not make the protection of workers any easier.
Having achieved its first levels of success in complete secrecy, its sudden global popularity on the back of its very low prices has now put the company in the spotlight. There's no going back.
In the fast fashion race, Shein, a Chinese retailer, has rapidly risen to compete with the likes of H&M and Zara — and even Amazon. But a deep look inside the company reveals questionable working and sourcing practices.
SHEIN opening its first pop up store in Paris in 2019
GUANGZHOU — The wall clock says 1:30 p.m. when the neon lights switch on again above the sewing machines and ironing boards. Between the boxes and the mountain-high piles of clothes, workers emerge from their nap. Small camp beds are hastily put away, phones slide back to the bottom of pockets. It's time to get back to work for the approximately 250 employees of this workshop in Nancun, a village that's been absorbed into the megacity of Guangzhou, in the very south of China.
The staccato sounds of the needles pricking the fabrics fills the space again, under the close watch of the foreman. Floral dresses, hoodies and colorful strapless tops are piled up on large tables, soon to be packed in transparent pouches. On the bags, on the labels of the clothes, on the wall at the entrance to the workshop, a single name appears: Shein (pronounced “she-in”).
That name doesn't ring a bell? Ask a teenage girl. She’ll probably show you her jacket, her trousers or an accessory bought for a ridiculous price on the app of her smartphone. Barely known a year ago, Shein has conquered the wardrobes of young fashionistas across Europe and the United States at lightning speed. It's been enough to make "fast fashion" giants like Zara and H&M shake.
Last May, Shein overtook Amazon to become the most downloaded shopping app in the United States. The brand is even leading the American fast fashion sector with over a quarter of the market, as much as H&M and Zara combined.
Shein is now one of the few Chinese consumer brands to make a name for itself in the West. Yet oddly, no one in China is aware. Why? Because the brand does not exist in its native country. Shein exclusively focuses the sales on foreign markets.
By offering an online-only shopping experience, the brand has largely benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic while Zara and H&M stores remained closed. Its sales reportedly exploded by 250% in 2020, exceeding 10 billion dollars or half of the turnover of Spanish clothing giant Inditex, the parent company of Zara. Its social media accounts gather tens of million followers, and shein.com had 126 million visits back in January 2022, a third more than Zara, according to Similarweb.
Rumor now has it that the company, which counts some 10,000 employees and a presence in more than 150 countries, is preparing for a record IPO on Wall Street.
Though Shein is experiencing global success, not much public information about the company and its enigmatic founder, Xu Yangtian, can be found. Specialized in online marketing and SEO, he launched his wedding dress business in 2008, before extending to all types of women's clothing in 2012. The company had neither a factory nor stock and had the articles manufactured according to the orders received.
The turning point happened in 2015 when Xu Yangtian decided to turn his company into a "fast fashion" brand: he hired designers, seized Chinese competitors, set up his own supply chain, shortened his company name to Shein and established its headquarters in Guangzhou, the epicenter of a China which remains the world's largest supplier of clothing despite the increase in the labor cost.
Workers at a clothes manufacturing factory in Lianyungang, China
The concept of "fast fashion" is nothing new, but Shein found a way to reproduce it even faster and much cheaper than the competition. The Shein website is full of $4 dresses, $10 shoes and accessories costing less than a dollar. And when Zara was making the headlines by releasing 10,000 new products a year, with a production cycle of less than four weeks, Shein posted up to 6,000 new items a day and reduced the time from design to packaging to 1-2 weeks.
Shein’s successful strategy mainly relies exclusively on online sales, revenue from Chinese e-commerce (the strong use of influencers and "social-commerce", permanent rewards and special offers to encourage more purchases, etc.), a few tax advantages but also the massive use of algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Shein responds in real time to new trends by using customer data, analyzing searches on the web and social networks and scrutinizing competitors' sites. "The data collected is fed to Shein's in-house design and prototyping team, which develops items based on demand trends and forecasts," says research and advisory firm Coresight Research. Shein starts by producing small quantities. If the design sells quickly, the company orders it again in larger quantities. If it doesn’t, remaining items get discarded and the design is abandoned for good.
But this would not be possible without an extremely well-run production chain. Over time, Shein has forged a close relationship with thousands of Guangzhou suppliers, providing them with on-time payments — which is rare in the industry. In return, the workshops are required to use the management software developed by Shein. “This tool allows Shein and its designers to quickly communicate sales data as well as new styles and market trends to manufacturers. Meanwhile, data on manufacturing processes are quickly sent back to Shein,” says Lili Cui, associate professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
There is not a minute to spare on the fourth floor of the sewing workshops building Les Echos is visiting. “Here, 20,000 items are produced per day. We handle everything, from the purchase of fabrics to the packaging of the items, including cutting. Shein wants us to go fast and gives us fines if we don't meet deadlines,” a foreman says. The conversation ends there. Shein prohibits any visits and comments from its official suppliers, explains the director.
Shein stays very evasive about its supply chain. The retailer relies heavily on small workshops, unlike other international brands who order large volumes from large factories. Shein tells Les Échos it works with 6,000 suppliers but does not publish their names and contact details. That is enough to fuel questions about its production methods.
The lunch break is an opportunity to talk to several workers in the canteen or the eateries adjoining the workshop buildings. Rice and boiled vegetables are quickly swallowed. Everyone rinses their bowl and chopsticks before putting them on the shelf until the next day. Some go to rest in the dormitories or others linger in the workshops.
Pedestrians walk past a Spanish fast fashion retailer Zara store in Shanghai
They all tell us about their extended working hours: “I work from 8 a.m. until noon, then from 1:30 p.m. until 5:30 p.m. and, after dinner, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.,” a seamstress says. The evening is free once a week, either on Saturday or on Sunday. That's a total of 74 hours of work per week.
Under Chinese Labor Law, weekly working hours are limited to a maximum of 44 hours, with 36 additional hours allowed per month. In reality, the textile industry often goes beyond that. What about holidays at Shein? One Sunday per month. "If I need more, I can ask my boss but it means I won't earn anything," explains a worker, specifying that she has no contract or social benefits.
All the workers here are migrants coming from other Chinese provinces who came to find a job or a better salary. “I earn a little more than in Jiangxi [an adjoining province, north of Guangzhou],” says this 50-year-old worker. Like all the employees Les Échos met, she is paid by the piece, which encourages her to increase her hours to produce more. “The more complex the piece is, the higher the pay,” she explains. “To keep it as fair as possible, tasks get distributed by our team leader to amount roughly the same value per worker,” says another seamstress.
A young seamstress talks about 1 yuan per item (15 cents), a woman in charge of packaging mentions 0.3 yuan (5 cents). It is hard to have an idea of the monthly wage. “I earn about 5,000 yuan a month [750 dollars] because I'm not very efficient,” says Hongxia, 19. Others say it is rather around 7,000 to 8,000 yuan per month (1,100 to 1,250 dollars). It all depends on how many tasks were performed, their complexity and the backlog of the workshop.
Most of the workshops are located near Shein's large warehouse in Foshan, a suburb of Guangzhou, from where orders are shipped. "Shein regularly conducts strict and comprehensive audits of its suppliers, and we also partner with third-party auditing companies to closely monitor and audit our suppliers," the company tells Les Échos.
On its U.S. website, the retailer briefly addressed modern slavery in a short statement and published a code of conduct reminding suppliers of their obligation to comply with all applicable laws, including child labor laws. But it is not uncommon in the textile industry for suppliers to subcontract part of the orders to small workshops with no direct link to the retailer, which makes controls difficult.
It takes a simple visit to the residential area of Nancun, where many small workshops are located, to confirm this. Across an alley, our gaze meets hundreds of bags stamped with the Shein logo. The manager, busy ironing long black dresses, says the order comes from “a friend”.
The presence of a very young girl among the three workers soon catches the eye. “I sort out the clothes according to their size then I put labels on them,” she explains. “I arrive around 9 a.m. and leave around 10 p.m. depending on overtime.” She says she earns 0.30 yuan per piece (5 cents) and has worked here since she left middle school last summer. How old is she? “My daughter is 16 and just comes to give me a hand,” her mother, who packs blouses on the side, quickly intervenes to end the discussion. Work is allowed for minors aged 16 and over in China, but night work and overtime is prohibited for those who are still students.
Shein tells Les Échos they conducted 700 audits in 2021, a figure relatively low given the number of suppliers. "It is impossible for Shein to control all the workshops and its code of conduct mainly aims at responding to the concerns of foreign media and consumers," explains Huang Yan, professor at the University of Technology of South China, in Guangzhou. More generally, the requirements in terms of production speed and the use of small workshops do not make the protection of workers any easier.
Having achieved its first levels of success in complete secrecy, its sudden global popularity on the back of its very low prices has now put the company in the spotlight. There's no going back.
The breakaway republic of Transnistria declared its independence 30 years ago, but not even Russia recognizes it as a country. Transnistria is both nostalgic for the Soviet era and prosperous thanks to Russian funds. And a trip there is the closest you can get to visiting the USSR.
Two women walk past a billboard advertising the presidential election campaigns in Tiraspol, Transnistria.
“It’s like North Korea here — we can’t leave the country.” Dimitri, around 30 years old, takes a passport out of his pocket. Delivered by Transnistria — a “country” recognized by no state, not even Russia — the document allows him to travel to only two places in the world: South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Georgian enclaves also claiming their allegiance to the Kremlin. Only one issue: There is no airport in Transnistria, so escaping is only an imagined possibility.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
The young man could ask for a Moldavian passport: After all Transnistria, which borders Ukraine along 450km like a snake, is officially part of the country. But the procedure is long and costly. “The government does not want to give us documents that would allow us to vote. They’re scared of who we would put in power!” He smiles. Here, Moscow fascinates while Europe repels, and Western journalists are banned from staying.
Transnistria was built through historical wars and ethnic mixing — it was invaded by Greeks, Romans, Tatars, Ottomans and Romanians. Now, they talk, eat and dream in Russian. The 500,000 inhabitants believe they were shackled at the beginning of the 1990s when Moldova, which speaks Romanian, forbade them to speak Russian. After that, the distrust never stopped: In a 2009 referendum, 97% of Transnistrians voted once again to be reattached to Russia.
They even display a clear nostalgia for the USSR. Here, there are no bell towers in the middle of villages but Lenin statues and cultural centers celebrating a time when equality was not a vain word. More than a trip to the fringes of Europe, Transnistria offers a trip down memory lane like few that exist in the world.
“Stop saying we are in the USSR! Back then, we only needed one job to make a living, now it’s two,” says our driver ironically, who is also an accountant making barely €500 a month. “At the time, we could also drive only two hours to go swim in the Black Sea. Since then, Ukraine has taken up all the seafront, and Moldova does not have access to the sea anymore. Men from Transnistria are not allowed to go. The Ukrainians are afraid we are Russian spies,” he says.
Nostalgia peaks when locals meet at the “Back to the USSR” café to eat cabbage salad or bortsch, a beet soup with some floating pieces of meat. The atmosphere is decidedly kitsch and even looks like a theme park: A phone identical to the one used by Winston Churchill to call Joseph Stalin is hung in the entrance, pictures of Lenin overlook the large staircase while an old piano and gramophones set the musical mood.
In the countryside, the trip back in time is even more spectacular. At the entrance of the villages of Sucleia and Slobozia, mosaics celebrate the bravery of communist workers. “Old people are extremely nostalgic for the 1960s. Moldova was a small paradise back in the days, some kind of Soviet Saint-Tropez. We were richer and it was warmer than in the rest of the USSR,” says Dimitri.
A collector's USSR memorabilia in Tiraspol.
In Kuchurgan, in the south, locals are getting ready to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the town. In the cultural center, the theater’s stage is decorated with large draped fabrics to welcome traditional dances, children’s poems and speeches. The festivities are in 48 hours and a singer takes the microphone to practice a nostalgic lament: “I want to get my old village back. We knew neither jealousy nor hate. We went to the neighbors’ without being invited.”
Gratitude for Russia is on everyone’s lips and appears completely rational: It funded the electric plant responsible for the city’s wealth and supplies all of Moldova. Up until today, it provides them with free electricity … or almost: The bill is sent to Moldova, which refuses to pledge allegiance to the Kremlin and has been displaying a visible European inclination since Maia Sandu was elected president of Moldova last year.
This free electricity makes Transnistrians much richer than other Moldovans. Most factories in the country (metalwork, fabric …) were set up by Russians, as they did in the enclaves of Ossetia (in Georgia) and Donbas (in Ukraine). It was a strategy to ensure the Kremlin’s influence in the Soviet republics of the past. More capitalist Bitcoin miners have also settled there in the past few years to take advantage of some of the cheapest electricity in the world.
The capital city, Tiraspol, seems more prosperous than Moldova’s Chisinau. In the center, a “hipster” café opened for the rare Western people who have ventured here. They spend hours in flea markets, looking for Soviet era relics: Lenin busts, hats and jackets from the Stalinist period. Stalin is not far, in a big building at the entrance of the capital. In front of him, a statue of Lenin, bigger than any other, surrounded by the Russian and Transnistrian flags — the latter also adorned with the hammer and sickle. It is here that the President of Transnistira Vadim Krasnoselsky is based.
The “country” also has its Constitution, its Parliament, its central bank and currency — the Transnistrian rouble, whose faded square and triangular plastic coins look like they’re out of a board game. A few hundred meters away sits the Soviets’ house, now city hall.
The Sheriff’s name — the “boss” of the region — is displayed at every street corner. Cigarettes, alcohol, newspapers, mobile phones, constructions: Nothing gets past him. An estimated one out of five residents work for his conglomerate. The oligarch, a former KGB spy, also built a gas station, a brand new supermarket and the biggest football stadium in the country. It's been a source of pride for Transnistrians who saw their team — the Sheriff’s Tiraspol — win against Real Madrid in last year’s Champions League.
But it is hard to ignore the checkpoints and sand bags at the entrance of villages. They were put there at the end of April, and no one knows if they were launched by Russians or Ukrainians. Since then, Russian soldiers inspect passing cars, guns in hand. There are 1,500 Russian soldiers in Transnistria, but it is not to be seen as an interference from Moscow: “Russians are not here to invade us, but to keep the peace,” says Dimitri.
Here, they do not scare anyone. “These Russian troops get themselves talked about a lot, but in reality they mostly recruit here,” says Claus Neukirch, a German in charge of Moldovan operations for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). “Even if it wanted to, Russia has no way of increasing the quota. It would mean having soldiers leave Russia and fly above Ukraine, which is totally impossible.” These troops have very little military equipment, a few T62 tanks at most. “We cannot really talk about a military power,” says Neukirch.
Women arrive at a polling station as part of Transnistria's presidential elections on Dec. 12, 2021.
Diego Herrera/SOPA Images/ZUMA
Transnistria is much less belligerent than a lot of people would like to believe. It displays some kind of neutrality in the Ukrainian conflict and for good reason: Most of its exports go to the European Union and trade with Russia keep decreasing. Even though he is close to Moscow, the president released a statement in which he neither condones nor condemns the war in Ukraine. His position is in stark contrast to that of other enclaves such as Abkhasia and South Ossetia in Georgia, which have clearly stated their support to Vladimir Putin.
Transnistria is being pragmatic: Although it claims its independence, its football club plays in the Moldovan championship. The coach, Yuri Vernydub, left the team in February 2022 to enlist in the Ukrainian army.
What is more worrying is the amount of ammunition stored in the north of Transnistria, in Cobasna. Regarded as the most important stock in all of eastern Europe, it is only a stone-throw away from the Ukrainian border and could contain about 20,000 tons of munitions, grenades and rockets: “It’s an extremely old warehouse and no one knows exactly where it is,” says Neukirch.
Shots were heard near it in the spring. If the site was to catch on fire, it would cause an explosion at least equivalent to Beirut’s port two years ago. A dormant volcano in short, much like this sleeping “republic” which refuses to lend an ear to the sound of bombs and wallows in a glorified past.
The breakaway republic of Transnistria declared its independence 30 years ago, but not even Russia recognizes it as a country. Transnistria is both nostalgic for the Soviet era and prosperous thanks to Russian funds. And a trip there is the closest you can get to visiting the USSR.
After withdrawing from Afghanistan, the U.S. left a power vacuum. The Taliban regime is officially isolated internationally, but the country has vast mineral resources — on which Beijing is keeping a close eye.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/Ukrinform via ZUMA Press Wire
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.